Equity Residential (EQR), the largest publicly traded U.S. apartment landlord, agreed to sell 27 properties to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC for as much as $1.5 billion.The transaction values the apartments at about $187,000 per unit, Chicago-based Equity Residential said in a statement today. The joint venture is obligated to purchase at least $1.38 billion of assets. The 8,010 units are located in northern New Jersey, Florida, Phoenix, Denver, Southern California and the Washington, D.C., and San Francisco Bay areas....

The $187,000 price per unit is more than the $149,000 average last year for the seven regions in which Equity Residential sold assets, according to Ben Carlos Thypin, director of market analysis at Real Capital Analytics Inc. in New York.“It is reasonable to assume these are assets of relatively high quality,” Thypin said in an e-mail.

Ben Carlos Thypin

I am currently the co-founder of Quantierra, the world's first data driven real estate brokerage and investment manager. In my former life as Director of Market Analysis at Real Capital Analytics, I worked with press outlets large and small to provide them with great data and insightful commentary. Here are some of the results of this collaboration. For the rest, please check out the News Archive.